Nichelle Nichols
-Chrissie
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In the early 1960s, television producer and writer Gene Roddenberry wanted to use television programming to comment on modern society and to voice his positive vision of humanity’s future. He had tried to do so on shows set in the contemporary time, but found himself repeatedly censored by the networks. He came upon the idea of telling these stories in a science fiction setting, using strange worlds and alien civilizations to allow him to comment on the events of the day, without directly referencing them.
He set his show hundreds of years in the future, on a spaceship whose purpose was scientific research and exploration. The Enterprise was “Starship Earth,” crewed in such a way as to show a human species united after overcoming our many conflicts. Roddenberry, a WWII veteran, made a point of including a Japanese officer to demonstrate that past conflicts can be put aside. He brought in a Russian officer, showing that there was an end to the Cold War, an idea that seemed impossible in the mid-1960s. Also in the command crew was an African woman, Lt. Nyota Uhura, showing that racial and sexual equality was unquestioned in the future.
On 28 December 1932, Grace Dell Nichols (she later changed her name to Nichelle) was born in a Chicago suburb to Samuel and Lishia Nichols. After she graduated high school in 1951, she worked as a singer and actress, primarily in stage roles, but also did some TV work. It was this which caught the attention of Roddenberry, who cast her in a guest role on his show The Lieutenant, in 1964. When she was cast as Nyota Uhura on Star Trek two years later, she was one of very few Black women with a regular role on a TV series. More than that, Uhura was an officer and an important and respected member of the command crew. Nichols was the first African American woman in a role on American television who wasn’t conforming to a stereotype. Actress and fellow Star Trek alum Whoopi Goldberg remembers being shocked as a child at seeing a black woman on television who “wasn’t a maid.”
It was important to Nichols and the Trek writers and producers that Uhura not seem to be treated any differently than anyone else on the crew, but were still able to use her character in anti-racist and anti-sexist storytelling. Most people know about the infamous first televised interracial kiss with William Shatner, but there were a few instances of the point being made in a much more subtle way. In “Balance of Terror,” when Captain Kirk must dismiss the navigator because he refuses to stop making racist comments about Spock, it is Uhura who replaces him at the station. Kirk tells the (white) man that there is no place for racism on his bridge, and replaces him with a Black woman. A subtle, but incredibly powerful moment; one that can be lost on later audiences for whom the shift from one bridge officer to another is all they see. In “The Naked Time,” a swashbuckling Sulu under the influence of an alien disease sees Uhura as a damsel in distress and grabs her with the words “I’ll protect you fair maiden” to which Nichols ad-libbed “Sorry, neither” as she pushed him away. With that short sentence, Nichols was able to assert her value as separate from that of her race or status as a virginal maiden. A post-women’s liberation audience sees the pushback against fair (meaning white) as obvious but the idea that she would not be a “maiden” is not at all shocking to modern viewers.
After the first year of the show, Nichols wasn’t entirely happy with her place in the cast and was considering leaving to take a role in a Broadway production. Around this time, she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who introduced himself as “her biggest fan” and praised her as a role model, not just for African Americans but for women, too. He said that Star Trek was the only show he and his wife allowed their children to stay up past their bedtimes to watch. This encounter convinced her to stay with Star Trek, and to use her role as a means to advocate for causes important to her.
After the show’s cancellation in 1969, Nichols continued acting, appearing in various movies and television shows. She returned to the role of Uhura in the short-lived Star Trek: The Animated Series in the mid-1970s, while also voicing other characters on the show, and for the six Original Series movies between 1979 and 1991. In between these, she used her Star Trek fame to advocate for women and African Americans in the sciences, including being the face of an outreach program which worked with her organization Women in Motion to bring women and minorities to NASA. This ultimately brought more than 8,000 people into the agency, making it the most diverse independent agency in the United States federal government. These recruits include Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, Guion [Gee-on] Bluford, the first African American in space, and Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space and, to bring it full circle, the first astronaut to appear in a Trek series.
Nichols continued her work, both in acting and advocacy, until being stopped by a stroke in 2015. She died on 31 July 2022, having seen her influence spread from the uncounted young people who saw her as a role model for what a woman, a Black woman, could achieve all the way to an Oval Office visit with President Barack Obama, an avowed Trekkie who, as a child, saw an aspect of himself on the television screen in the character of Nyota Uhura.